Game News 2.0

The golden age of music, movies and gaming were all roughly when you were 15.

Still bummed out that EA cancelled that new Respawn shooter? Maybe these guys will make it all better some day. They're basically a new studio made up of Titanfall and Apex Legends veterans. They include Mohammad Alavi, former Titanfall 2 senior game designer and supposedly the lead of the cancelled Titanfall Legends. One to keep an eye on, although don't expect anything soon.

"His criticism of Elden Ring's combat mechanics highlighted this (I'm not a fan of Elden Ring) when he states "its mechanics feel like something from 2004: hit one button to dodge, the other to attack. It’s a common complaint: you’re either dodging or parrying then countering" - didn't fancy using any of spells, pal? Or the stealth?"

Not even just that, but the variety in ER's combat comes from build types, the number of different enemies and boss types, the spells, and an insane amount of different weapons and weapon arts, which makes it one of the most varied combat systems in games in years, and that's ignoring the various consumables and stuff you can use against enemies.

I mean, Christ on a bike, if he complained that Elden Ring isn't as well presented in terms of story, characters, motion capture kind of stuff, or that a lot of the games systems aren't well explained or something, fair enough. I'd disagree with some of that but could see why someone would say that or why it'd put them off if they value those kind of things (which given their praise of the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, probably are things they value highly in games), but f*ck sake the one thing you can't really knock Elden Ring down on is the variety of the combat system.

A lot of games like Horizon, God of War etc make you such a tank and your enemies hit so softly that you only really die if you're just being a bit ignorant and trying to belt through everything with little care/focus. But that doesn't carry over to Elden Ring or other Souls games, where the entire combat system is built around risk v reward. Take the risk to time a parry right or to dodge an attack to try get a backstab, and you'll be rewarded for pulling it off. Trying to just stand in front of the enemy and tanking hits like you would in the big AAA games the author seems to like, and you're going to have a bad time.

I don't think he's just glossing over indies as I think the way he mentions them at the end of the article is his way of saying that the quality of indies as a whole hasn't really changed, but that the focus of the article is more about the decline of AAA games.

I never got into Civ V but really enjoyed VI a lot. I think Civ IV remains my all time favourite though. TBH it probably has less to do with the merits of each game and more to do with what was going on in my life and how much time I had to devote to learning and mastering them.

I generally trust Firaxis in whatever direction they choose to go, they've never made a bad mainline Civ game. Would have been more excited by an Alpha Centauri 2 announcement though.

haha i had a non gaming friend recently ask me for a game he could play while he was now working from home. I knew the type of games he liked and used to play. So i recommended Civ 5 (i have never played Civ but know about it), i told him to be careful with it though as it can suck up time pretty quickly i heard. The NEXT DAY he messages me going "jesus i see what you mean, i threw it on after dinner last night and before i knew it the sun was rising" 🤣

It didnt scare him away though, he just had to be careful going forward :D

It looks like Shinji Mikami is leaving Tango Gameworks.

Come Hither! Or uh, Get Over Here!

The Wolf Among Us 2 delayed out of 2023

Surely Sony would be better at this stage accepting the deal that COD gets to be on PS+ and earn the revenue from microtransactions rather than the retail of the game, especially considering how much better the F2P Warzone seems to be doing lately compared to the full price releases.

I get that they don't want to risk ever losing COD even 10 years down the line, but if I was a predominantly COD PS5 gamer I'd be starting to look at moving to Xbox regardless, as the deal will likely go through in some shape or form.

Lulu "Sony is the First of Us when it comes to games".

The relative number of consoles sold isn't that relevant, the regulators aren't there to help one console catch up on another, that's not their job. They aren't there to represent Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft. They're there to represent consumers. And the biggest third party publisher in existence, which has published games on all platforms for decades, suddenly being gobbled up and made to operate for the good of one console manufacturer only is indisputably a bad thing for consumers. The fact that that console is owned by a minority only serves to exacerbate the fact that this would be a bad thing for the majority of consumers.